Hiya,
just a quick one about modelling in 3ds max (9). I bought a copy from a company that went belly up and had some fun editing various creatures. Now I wanted to model faces as well, and, as I find the best way to learn is to go ahead and just load up a model and look how it's done I was a bit surprised to find the blinking eye and lip animation didn't seem to import (version 3.5 of the niftools max importer). Consequently, upon export, the animations were gone. I nifscoped the mesh and found the "NiGeomMorpherController" to be missing entirely in my export. My mesh worked fine in game but looked a bit, well, stoic.
At the niftools forum, the max thread is pretty much dead - is there anything I can do to alleviate the problem?

Apparently face editing contains some sort of forbidden lore from the dawn-times because nobody knows how to do it with animations. This community has been reusing the same old head models for years and years now...

Xaphod (of Psychodog Studios) did a tutorial for animating heads. It's in pdf format and has some pictures to help illustrate. http://www.mediafire.com/?kui2ti2tjaeu1kt

Rhedd also did a tutorial for animating faces, but his site is long out of commission. I vaguely remember it having images but definitely cannot be sure. Tamriel Rebuilt seems to have mirrored the text here: http://tamriel-rebuilt.org/?p=modding_data/tutorials§ion=2867

Well thank you both for your answers
Its also the one I dreaded most, as the tutorial uses the Bethesda Exporter for max. This only works for up to version 5. Past that, its the niftools plugin: I didn't tick "ignore root node" (which means: use it! in my book, as mentioned somewhere in the changelog of the plugins) when importing *.nifs containing morphs. But no luck.
I assume that''s why we haven't seen much new modelled heads, as "discreet" (I think it was) 3d studio max 5 is about as easy to come by as a bible signed by Martin Luther - and about as up to date. But thanks again MagicNakor especially for the *.pdf file as now the tut @TR makes a lot more sense to me.
Cheers!

As far as i remember now NifTools Max plugin imports morph targets as two additional meshes that should be set back in Max morpher modifier. I made MW heads with NifTools exporter (it works not that smooth as BS Max4, but does the job). Here are some Max (mainly animation) tutorials and templates i once collected:

http://www.4shared.com/zip/StpiUiCk/MW_Heads_Tutorial.html
http://www.4shared.com/zip/Lx0x2Wym/MW_AnimBlankfiles_forMax51and_.html
http://www.4shared.com/zip/ptY8Qf1z/MW_MAX_Anim.html
http://www.4shared.com/zip/i8ecUorQ/MW_BlankAnimNifs.html

Hi Axel,
nice to see you again!
thank you very much for your help (@everyone)!
If I can't work something out now, at least I know it's my own fault
Cheers!